I’m a writer in New York. I’ve written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Slate, The Daily Beast, The New Inquiry, n+1, Complex, Bookforum, Edge, Billboard, Men’s Health, The Believer, LA Review of Books and many others. I’m also author of the sex memoir Levitate the Primate: Handjobs, Internet Dating, and Other Issues for Men, which The Millions called “a Symposium for heteros,” and The Atlantic selected as one of its “Best Beach Reads for Smart People.”

These predictive tools have arrived at a time when police surveillance of social networks and online behavior has become endemic. When the NYPD raided the Grant and Manhattanville housing developments arresting 103 alleged gang members in early June, it came after logging more than a million social media pages and 40,000 calls made from prison. This combination of predictive tools that direct officers into certain neighborhoods backed by an increasing number of channels to surveil those who live in areas predetermined to be criminal is not new, but an extension of a pathology of law enforcement that assumes a criminal pretext by its mere presence in a community. It’s not predictive policing that makes this phenomenon possible, but it takes it one step further toward being totally irrefutable, secured by computer objectivity that further distances people from any direct power within the structures around them.

Most law officers already police preemptively through their legal ability to instigate a physical encounter with a civilian and interpret the response as criminal, something that’s become endemic in recent times. Over the weekend, Arizona State University professor Ersula Ore was arrested on charges of aggravated assault against a police officer after being stopped for crossing a campus street to avoid construction. When she asked the officer why she pointed out that there was construction obstructing the way she was told she would be slammed onto a car and arrested if she didn’t provide identification. When she pressed her point, arguing that the stop was unnecessary, she was slammed onto a car then thrown to the ground. As she was pulled up off the ground her leg made contact with the officer’s, leading to a charge of aggravated assault against a police officer. After reviewing dashboard video of the event, the police department released a statement saying there was no police misconduct.

West Midlands Police Firearms Officer, one of several English towns using PredPol’s predictive systems. (Photo credit: West Midlands Police)

Stories like this are horrific, yet so numerous they can feel impossible to keep separate from one another. During a recent protest in Stockton, Carey Downs was arrested and charged with obstructing a police officer and resisting arrest after being shoved to the ground by police and instinctively reaching for a baton as he fell. He was marching through the city with a group of protestors that included elderly women and children in his memory of his son James Rivera, who had been shot 48 times and killed by police in 2010. In Alpine, Texas, police raided a local smoke shop run by two sisters. After questioning one of the officers about the validity of the search warrant (which had no address or names listed on it), one of the sisters, Arielle Lipsen, claims she was thrown to the ground and hit in the neck with the butt of a DEA agent’s rifle. As she fell one of her legs allegedly made contact with the agent’s leg and Lipsen was arrested for assaulting a federal agent.

What joins all these disparate stories is an underlying legal structure that allows police near total discretion to initiate violent interactions and interpret what is and isn’t criminal against them ex post facto. The American Constitution Society describes these as “cover arrests,” intended “to help justify or explain an officer’s use of force or other exercise of authority,” something the group argues has become dangerously widespread. These cover arrests are regularly upheld by courts by virtue of broadly vague and inconsistent laws governing police behavior. Washington D.C.’s law are characteristically unclear, with the misdemeanor class of assaulting a police officer defined as a anyone who “without justifiable and excusable cause, assaults, resists, opposes, impedes, intimidates, or interferes with a law enforcement officer on account of, or while that law enforcement officer is engaged in the performance of his or her official duties…” This description leaves almost an alarming variety of physical interaction open to being called as misdemeanor assault, and has been used to prosecute and convict a man for holding onto his steering wheel while a police officer tried to pull him out of his car to a woman who refused to take her hands out of her pockets.

In 2012, an Indiana law was passed making it legal to use deadly force against police officers to protect against illegal entry into a person’s home or vehicle. The law expanded the 2006 “Castle Doctrine” to address the hypothetical scenario described by state senator Michael R. Young, in which if a person came home to find a police officer raping their spouse or child the only legal response would be to file a lawsuit and wait years for adjudication. The law has drawn wide criticism from its potential to promote violent confrontation, but it underscores the absurd disempowerment most citizens have in any given encounter with police, which, when combined with minority groups predetermined to be criminal by aggregated data and decades of accreted prejudice and systemic exploitation, becomes a toxic license to do almost anything.

It’s often claimed that violence in America has dramatically decreased in recent years. According to Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2009 there were 15 violent crimes per 1,000 people over the age of 12, down from 51.2 per 1,000 in 1994. During the same period, the US incarceration rate has more than doubled, capping a decades long increase with more than 2.4 million currently imprisoned. A recent Pew survey found that 1 in 31 American adults are currently imprisoned, on parole, or serving probation. As is often noted, roughly 95% of all federal cases end in plea bargains in which coerced admissions of guilt are exchanged for leniency. As violence in prisons and jails is incredibly difficult to measure and often goes unreported, it’s likely that America isn’t a less violent country but has simply moved its violence into a special legal category that makes it effectively invisible. This de facto admission that pursuing justice against improper or violent police behavior is too expensive, slow, and terrifying an ordeal for most to go through has greatly contributed to the transformation of police impunity into a weapon unto itself.

It’s easy to think of technological advancements as agents of historical progress, but it’s also true that progress is driven by desire toward a particular outcome. The emergence of predictive policing, and the easy ability to scrape social networks and Internet hubs, feels alarmingly new, a specific product of our present form of modernity. It is so disturbing because it proves our desire to be insulated from violence is self-defeating and has now jumped outside ourselves and taken shelter in semi-autonomous machines that watch us. Worse yet it shows how much violence has become institutionally normalized in the decades leading us up to this historical embarkation.

Predictive policing doesn’t represent a new structural shift in society so much as it expands a pre-existing one, making millions of people suddenly aware of how much their sense of freedom and dignity depended on never drawing the attention of a cop, a luxury that is growing increasingly scarce and expensive to secure. Now that our lives are more visible to authority than ever before, there should be some nauseous recoil at how fake, selfish, and deluded our past sense of security was as we look forward to a future in which the surest way to protect one’s self is to remain unseen, something that will very soon become impossible.

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